Black Out_A Novel

40

Sarah had read something, some book about food, that made her think they should stop eating red meat. So there was a lot of stir-frying going on at the Harrison home, lots of tofu and fish and poultry being prepared with vegetables and brown rice. But somehow everything seemed to taste like soy sauce, no matter what the ingredients. The house was starting to reek of it. But Harrison never complained about his wife’s cooking; he always ate what she prepared and showered her with compliments. He appreciated that she cooked at all, that she made a point of having something ready for him when he came home, that she waited and ate with him most of the time, unless it was very late.

Even though he’d called and told her not to wait up, he found her on the couch when he walked through the front door. She was watching some movie with the sound down low, huddled under a blanket. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were tearing up a house on the screen, shooting at each other with big guns. He could see the blond crown of Sarah’s head and heard her sigh as he shut the door and rearmed the alarm system.

She sat up quickly, looking startled, as if she’d been dozing.

“What are you doing up?” he asked.

“I was up with the baby,” she said through a yawn. She lifted her long, graceful arms above her head in a stretch. “I thought I’d wait awhile and see if you came home.”

He came to sit beside her. He took her into his arms and felt the sleepy warmth of her body. She smelled of raspberries, something in her shampoo.

“I made a stir-fry. Want me to heat it up?” He noticed that there was something shaky about her voice.

“No thanks,” he said. “I ate. A big, juicy hamburger dripping with fat, with ketchup and mayonnaise.” He held out his hands to indicate the enormousness of the burger. “And fries, soaked in oil.”

She wrinkled her nose and made a sound of disgust. “If you only knew,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “Poison.”

“I’ll die happy,” he said, shedding his jacket.

His eyes fell upon it then. On the end table by the couch was a stack of their bank statements. The sight of it made his stomach bottom out. He turned to see her watching his face.

“I never look at these things, you know?” she said with a light laugh. She rubbed her temple, then wrapped her arms around her middle. She bit her lip the way she did before she was about to cry. “But I saw this interview on CNN. Some finance expert who said that women are disempowered in a marriage by being ignorant regarding their finances. It seemed obvious, but then I realized I don’t even know how much money we have in the bank.”

She took a deep breath. “And I thought, we have a daughter now and I don’t want her to see her mother as this helpless woman who doesn’t even know how to pay her bills online. If anything ever happened to you, I wouldn’t know anything about our money. And you’re a cop, you know. Something could happen.”

He kept his eyes on her face. He watched her eyes widen and rim with tears.

“Sarah—”

“We got married so young,” she said quickly, interrupting him. “I literally came right from my parents’ house into our marriage. Someone’s always taken care of me, Ray. But now there’s a person who needs me to take care of her.”

He started to talk again, but she lifted up her hand.

“I don’t understand all these huge withdrawals from our savings. And then this deposit,” she said, picking up the pile. He saw her handwriting and some highlighted entries. The papers quivered in her grasp. Over the baby monitor, he heard his daughter sigh and shift in her sleep. “Can you explain this to me, Ray?”

His mind raced through a hundred lies he could tell, a hundred different techniques he could use to manipulate her in this moment to make her feel bad or wrong for confronting him this way. This is what he was good at, after all, molding himself, his tone, his words, to make people do and say and think what he wanted. But he didn’t have the heart for any more lies, any more secrets. As he sat in their comfortable home and told her every wrong thing he’d done, wasn’t it also true that in some secret part of himself he was glad? Glad that, for better or worse, she would finally know all of him?


It looks as if the plane is landing in a sea of black, except for the tiniest strip of lights along what I’m hoping is the ground. The ride has been turbulent, and I’m not sure how much more my stomach can take as we hurtle downward. The plane pitches and lofts, and I’m wondering if it’s normal, if, after all this, the tiny plane I’m in is going to crash. What would happen to Victory then? I try not to think about it during the white-knuckle journey to the ground. But when we touch down, it’s surprisingly gentle.

“They said there will be someone to greet you,” the pilot says through the headphones. “Someone waiting.”

“Who?” I ask. “Who’s waiting?”

I see the pilot shrug. He doesn’t turn around. Again I have the thought that he doesn’t want to see my face, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t want me to see his. As it is, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.

“I don’t know,” he says, his tone flat and not inviting further questions.

When the engines are off, I thank him, exit the plane, and step into a humid Florida night. The tree frogs are singing and the mosquitoes start biting as soon as I strip off my coat, which I won’t need here. I can already feel beads of sweat make their debut on my forehead.

In the distance I see the dark, lean form of a man standing beside a vehicle. Its headlights are the only thing illuminating the blackness except for the light coming from the small control tower above us. I don’t see anyone up there.

I approach the vehicle for lack of any alternatives, and I realize that it’s the Angry Man.

“Do you know who I am?” he asks as I draw near.

I shake my head. The situation takes on a surreal quality. “I remember you,” I say. “But I don’t know your name.”

“My name’s Alan Parker, father of Melissa, husband of Janet.”

The words hit as though he’s thrown stones at me. I feel that the knowledge should illuminate what’s happening to me, but it doesn’t.

“Once upon a time,” he goes on, “my wife and I believed that Frank Geary murdered our daughter.”

He is dressed in dark pants and a heavy flannel shirt, with a jacket over that. It is far too hot for all those clothes, but he doesn’t appear uncomfortable. Instead he seems to hunch himself in as if bracing against the cold. And is he shivering just slightly? He seems out of place in this moment of my life, as though he has no business being there.

“Our rage was the driving force in our lives for years. It consumed us.” He releases a throaty cough, then pulls a pack of Marlboro reds from his pocket, lights one with a Zippo, and takes a long, deep drag. He has the look of a lifelong smoker, gray and drawn.

“You know, the thing was, I was a terrible father. Absent a lot, distant when I was around. I never so much as held my daughter or told her I loved her in all the years she was alive. I provided for her, sure, roof over her head, nice things, college. That’s what I knew how to do. That’s all I thought a father had to do. The point is, I never devoted much of myself to her until after she’d been taken from me. But I was a berserker in the crusade for justice against Frank Geary. I think Melissa would have been surprised by my devotion. I think she died believing I didn’t love her.”

I don’t know what to say to him. I’m not sure why he’s telling me this or what we’re doing here. But I listen because I don’t have any choice, and I figure as long as he’s talking, my daughter is safe. My whole body tingles with the desire to be moving, to be anywhere else but here.

“Of course,” he says, “it was all much harder on Janet. The mother-daughter thing, man, you can’t get inside that. I was filled with rage, with the desire for revenge. It was like rocket fuel in my veins. But when Melissa died, Janet died, too. Simple as that. She was still walking around, but she never lived another day of her life. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she did what she did. But I never saw it coming; I wouldn’t have thought her capable.”

He is racked suddenly by a fit of coughing so intense, it’s embarrassing to watch. He takes a wad of tissues from his pants and covers his mouth until the coughing subsides. When he pulls it back from his mouth, I can see that the tissues are dark with blood. My mind is filled now with the memories of the night Janet Parker killed Frank and then herself. I can hear the gunshots and smell the smoke. I never asked myself who started that fire, but I imagine it was Marlowe. I think he intended for my mother to die that night, too. He didn’t expect me to run back in and drag her outside. I am thinking about this as Alan Parker recovers himself and starts to talk again.

“Even as I mourned Janet, I was happy for her in a way. I knew how good it must have felt to pull that trigger. I know she died at peace.” He has a sad smile on his face that reminds me of how Janet Parker looked that night, as though she’d laid down a great burden. I don’t tell him this. I don’t know if he realizes I watched her die, and I’m not sure what good it will do to tell him.

“But Frank Geary didn’t kill Melissa,” I say, really just guessing.

He shook his head. “He may not have, no. I had Melissa’s body exhumed when we won the first round of evidence retesting. And the DNA samples found were similar to Frank Geary’s without being identical. So the conclusion was that Marlowe Geary played some role in her torture and death.”

There’s flash lightning in the clouds above us and the deep rumble of distant thunder, but it’s not raining. Every few minutes the sky illuminates and then goes dark again, as if someone is turning it on and off with a switch.

“To be honest,” he says, “I’d suspected this early on. In my life I’ve been around enough killers—in Vietnam—to know one when I saw one. At the trial, Marlowe seemed as dead inside as his father. As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

I realize something then. The lights start to come on inside, illuminating places within me that have been dark for so long. “Briggs worked for you. You sent him to find Marlowe after we ran.”

He nods. “I wasn’t sure what Marlowe had to do with Melissa’s death. But I knew he’d used Janet to kill his father. And when I realized he was killing other women, taking other people’s daughters away, I wanted to stop him. I was filled with a sick rage—it was something living inside me. But I didn’t want him arrested and in prison. I didn’t want that kind of justice. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to suffer and die the way his victims did. And I knew plenty of people to help with that—the military is good at turning out merciless killers.”

“Why didn’t you come yourself?”

“After Janet died, I started coughing up blood. The sickness of fear and anger, you can’t carry it forever. It starts to kill you. In my case, cancer.”

More of that horrible coughing. I hate, am repulsed by him, and pity him in equal measure.

“After you and Marlowe were ‘killed’ in your car accident, I had an epiphany. I realized that my and Janet’s rage and desire for revenge had cost us everything. We might have had some years together, we might have touched happiness again, if only we had faced down our fears, our regrets, our hatred for Frank Geary. But instead we let the rip he’d opened in the fabric of our life suck us in like a black hole. We let him destroy all three of us.”

He looks at me as though trying to decide if I’m listening to him. Whatever he sees on my face makes the corners of his mouth turn up slightly.

“I decided I’d fight my cancer and live for Janet and Melissa rather than die for them. As I fought that war, I realized that the rage I’d directed at Frank and Marlowe Geary was really directed at myself, for all the ways I’d failed as father and husband. If I’d been present for them while they lived, maybe I wouldn’t have had so many regrets when they died.”

I notice how still he is. There was so much anxiety and adrenaline living inside me that I couldn’t keep myself from fidgeting, shifting my weight from foot to foot, pacing a few steps away, then back toward him. But he is fixed and solid. He keeps his hands in his pockets, his eyes locked on some spot off in the distance. All there is to him is his raspy voice and the story he tells.

“When I went into remission, I started an organization called Grief Intervention Services with some friends of mine to help other victims and families of victims face their fear and heal.”

I draw in a sharp breath as I remember. “Your website. I visited it after I heard about you on television.”

He nods. “The website captured your IP address. It was only a matter of days before we traced it to Gray Powers. It was only a little while longer before we connected him to you. Just one visit confirmed that you were Ophelia March.”

I stare at his pale face and think how ill he looks. There is a distance to his stare. He is already on his way somewhere else.

“Naturally, I started to wonder. If Ophelia survived, what about Marlowe Geary? And, if so, where is he?”

“But you’d given up your quest for revenge,” I say, putting my hand on the hood of his car. I am feeling weak now, wobbly. The frenetic energy I had is abandoning me.

He offers a thin smile. “I’ve always remembered you, Ophelia. You were the saddest-looking child I’d ever seen. I remember you coming and going from that farm, the circles under your eyes, the way you hunched your shoulders and hung your head. You were living in a pit of snakes; I was never sure which of them would be first to squeeze the life out of you, then swallow you whole. I should have guessed it would be Marlowe.”

I don’t know what to say.

“The man you knew as Dr. Paul Brown believed that somewhere inside you, you might know where Marlowe Geary was. He suspected that your fugue states, the flights you made from your life as Annie Powers, were Ophelia’s attempts to return to him. He also felt you were on the cusp of remembering a lot of the things you had forgotten. So he devised ways to jog your memory a bit.”

“Wait,” I say, lifting a hand. “Dr. Brown worked for you? So the encounter on the beach, the necklace—those were his ideas on how to jog my memory? So that you could find Marlowe Geary and exact your revenge?”

“This is not only about me and what I want.”

“No?”

“No. It’s about both of us. I’m trying to help you.”

I confided those things to my doctor, and he used them to manipulate my memory. It seems a relatively small violation in comparison to everything, but I feel my face go hot with anger. I realize that I have grown uncomfortable with rage. Ophelia used to rant and scream and weep. But Annie is always dead calm.

“But Vivian brought me to Dr. Brown,” I say. I remember then that Gray told me that the doctor was someone Drew knew. And suddenly I feel sick, realizing how everything fits together.

Parker gives me a sympathetic grimace; for a second he looks as though he might reach to comfort me, but I take a quick step back from him. “They thought they were helping you, Ophelia. They thought they were helping you to face your fears so that you could be well again. For Victory.”

At first I think he means my husband, too. But it doesn’t sound like Gray. He’s too upright, too honest. He loves me too much. I can’t imagine him being a part of something like this. And if he were, why would he kill Briggs?

“Gray didn’t know what was happening,” I say. “He was afraid, too, that Marlowe—or someone from the past—had come for me. That’s why he killed Briggs.”

Parker offers a slow, sad nod. “You’re right. He never would have been a part of it. He would never deceive you or cause you so much pain. In fact, in his way, though only because he loves you, he has been enabling you. Maybe part of him doesn’t want you to remember.”

“So who then? Who thought they were helping me then?” I yell, nearly shriek. I am startled by my own emotion. He seems startled, too, as though he didn’t expect any of this to upset me. He raises a calming hand.

“Your in-laws, Drew and Vivian. A representative approached Vivian, told her that you’d contacted us for help and then changed your mind. She and Drew agreed to our plan to help you confront your past.”

I think of Vivian taking me to Dr. Brown, of the fear on her face when I confronted her with the things that were happening to me. I struggle with this, trying to recast her as the liar and the manipulator she had to be to do that. I want to think I know her well enough to know that she was trying to help me. I hope that’s true, at least.

“No,” I say, drawing in a breath to calm myself. Something is wrong. “They’d never let you hurt Victory. They’d die first.” I am as sure of this as I have ever been of anything.

“Admittedly,” he says with a mild shrug, “they weren’t aware the lengths to which we’d go to accomplish our goals. No one ever is.”

He seems empty then, vacant, and I see that Alan Parker is a man who has been gutted by grief and rage, filled up again by a quest for revenge that he could never quite release, even when he knew better. I feel a sob rise up, a great tide moving inside my chest.

“They were so sure you were helpless, so devastated by the events of your life that you would never be whole. They resorted to these tactics to help you. Well, really to help Victory, I think, so that she would have a strong and healthy mother. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that now you’re the one to help them.”

I feel that adrenaline pump again as my heart starts to thud.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s all up to you now, Ophelia.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, moving closer to him. My voice has taken on the quality of a plea. “Where are we? Where’s my daughter?”

I’ve never felt so frightened or so desperate, but he just moves away from the car. I see he is going to leave me here. “The keys are in the ignition. There’s a gun in the glove box. At the end of the road, you make a right. You’ll know where you are once you’re driving.”

He starts walking away from me then, moving toward the trees that surround the airfield. “You need to be strong now, Ophelia. Stronger than you’ve ever been. For yourself, for your daughter, for me.”

“You never needed me to lead you to Marlowe,” I call after him. “You knew where he was. Why are you doing this?”

I see him lift the wad of tissues to his mouth, see his shoulders hunch into a cough. That sob that’s been living in my chest escapes through my throat.

“What do you want me to do?” I cry out. “What do I need to do to get my daughter back?”

Just then the tower lights go out. I look up, and as I do, the runway lights go dark. The plane is gone; the pilot must have moved into the hangar, because I never heard it take off again. The only lights come from the headlights of the car beside me.

“Tell me!” I yell into the darkness. But the Angry Man is gone. I am alone. The air around me is thick with silence. Out of sheer desperation, I get into the car and start to drive. I turn onto the road, and he’s right—I do know where I am. The farm is less than ten miles away.


“They are not here,” said Esperanza at the door to my house. She blocked the small opening she’d created and was peering at Detective Harrison worriedly through the crack.

“I need to know where they are, Esperanza,” he said sternly. “This isn’t a social call.”

She looked at him blankly, opened the door a little wider. She was shaking her head and seemed close to tears.

“Miss Victory is with her abuela,” she said. “Mr. Gray, he left en la noche. Nothing. He say nothing. Mrs. Annie, she’s—” That’s where she started to cry. “They’re all gone.”

“Let me in, Esperanza,” he said more gently, giving her what he hoped was a look of compassion. His “I’m a really good guy and I only want to help” look. It worked: She opened the door, and he stepped inside. She started talking fast, her tears coming harder now.

“Mr. Gray, he call me the other day, say Victory is coming home, can I come back? I come back but no Victory,” she said.

Harrison took her by the elbow, led her over to the couch, and stood beside her until she managed to stop crying and looked up.

“We wait and wait,” she said. “In the night a call come. Mr. Gray leaves. He just told me go home and no worry. But he was very afraid.” She motioned at her face, to tell him she read Powers’s expression. “So I stay. I wait for them to come home.”

“When was this?” he asked her.

“Two nights I wait.”

“And you haven’t heard anything else?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing. I call Mr. Drew. No answer; no one call back.”

He walked over to the phone and scrolled through the numbers on the caller ID, looking for what, he didn’t know. “The call came on this phone?”

She shook her head. “No. His cell phone.”

Harrison felt like he was trying to hold on to a fistful of sand—the tighter his grasp, the faster it slipped away. His desperation was compounded by the promises he’d made to his wife. She didn’t care about the money, she said. She accepted his addiction. What she couldn’t understand and wasn’t sure she could forgive were the lies, the blackmail, the secrets he’d kept from her. She couldn’t understand what he’d done to me.

“Why, Ray? Why didn’t you come to me? We could have asked my parents for money, taken out a loan. How could you let yourself go so low? It’s not you.”

But that’s what she didn’t quite get. It was him. Part of him was in fact that low. Money and the things he thought it could give him—not possessions necessarily, but freedom, ease of living, a certain power he’d lacked all his life—obsessed him. That’s how he could risk the small amount they had in the hope of making more, that’s how he could blackmail us not just for the money to pay off his gambling debts but a hundred thousand dollars besides. And Gray had paid it—paid it without a word, because he loved me that much, because he wanted to protect me.

“You need to make it right, Ray,” Sarah said.

“How? How do I make it right?” he asked. He reached for her, but she moved away from him. She shifted over to the corner of their modular unit and sat there with her arms wrapped around herself in a protective hug.

“You can start by paying him back everything you didn’t give the bookie and making a plan to pay back the rest,” she said gently.

The thought filled him with dread. He couldn’t stand the idea that their savings account would be empty, that they’d go back to living paycheck to paycheck. That he’d always be worried about the next time the car broke down or the refrigerator started to leak. He wasn’t sure he could do it.

“Sarah…” he started, but found he couldn’t finish.

“Find a way to make things right, Ray.” She didn’t issue any threats or ultimatums; she didn’t ask him to leave the house. But he heard in her tone what she never said: Find a way to make things right, Ray, or I won’t ever be able to look at you the same way again.

She must have seen the despair on his face, because she moved back over to him and placed a hand on his leg. He couldn’t even look at her.

“Everybody makes mistakes, Ray,” she said, her voice very low and gentle. He’d heard her talk to the baby in this tone. “Everybody stumbles. It’s what you do then that makes or breaks your life. It’s what you do after you fall that’s the measure of who you are.”

He left the room then. She called after him quietly, but he kept walking. He walked out onto his back porch and gazed up at the sky. He didn’t want to be in the same room with her. He couldn’t stand for her to see him cry.


“What’s going on?” Harrison was snapped back to the present by Ella’s voice. She stood in the open doorway looking different somehow, a little angry maybe. She looked fit and strong dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, sneakers on her feet. She didn’t seem primped and coiffed in the usual way. He found himself staring at her, trying to figure out why she looked so different. She frowned at him and then walked over to Esperanza.

“Where’s Gray?” Ella said, taking her by the shoulders.

“Gone,” Esperanza said, starting to weep again. Ella embraced her. “I don’t know where.”

Ella glanced back over at Harrison. “What’s he doing here?”

“This is none of your business, Mrs. Singer. Go home,” he said.

She gave him a dark look, released Esperanza, and walked over to him, got in his face. “Don’t tell me that. First Annie disappears. Then Drew and Vivian take off with Victory. There’s a memorial service—pretty premature, if you ask me. The woman’s only been missing two weeks. Now Gray’s gone. Someone needs to tell me what’s going on. It is my business. These people are my friends.”

“Go home, Mrs. Singer,” he said again, walking over toward the door and holding it open for her. He saw color rise on her neck and cheeks, but she didn’t move.

“I can get you into his office upstairs,” she said after a beat. “Maybe you’ll find some of the answers you’re looking for up there.”

He remembered the door with the keypad lock from his previous visits. “You know the code,” he said, not even bothering to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

She nodded. “Ophelia let it slip.”

“She let it slip?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Seems unlikely.”

“Maybe she just got a little careless around her friends,” she said with a shrug.

He didn’t quite believe her, but he was out of luck and out of time.

“Okay, so what is it?”

“You tell me what’s happening and I’ll tell you the code.”

He released a sigh and rolled his eyes. “You’re not helping her by slowing me down. You know that.”

“Just tell me.”

He was desperate enough to do it. He told her everything he knew, starting with my fake identity and my history with Marlowe Geary and ending with Alan Parker and Grief Intervention Services.

“You think she’s alive?”

“I do. And I think she needs some help. I just don’t know how to give it to her.”

Ella gave him a nod; he thought she looked a little sad. “It’s VICTORY, with a five for the V and a zero for the O.”

He took the stairs to the office with Ella right behind him and punched in the code. The door unlocked, and he pushed it open. The room was dark, and when he stepped inside, he realized something that caused his stomach to bottom out.

“You called her Ophelia,” he said, turning around.

“Sorry, Detective Harrison, nothing personal. You should have taken your money and disappeared.”

She held something in her hand that he didn’t recognize until the prongs shot into his body and electricity started to rocket through him. A horrific scream escaped him; he barely recognized it as his own voice. The room around him spiraled as the pain seemed to ratchet higher and higher until he could hardly form a thought in his mind. Before everything went black, he remembered his wife coming up behind him on the porch and wrapping her arms around him as he wept. He remembered feeling a terrible mingling of deep shame in himself, gratitude for her love, and the fervent hope that he could be worthy of her again.

“You can fix this, Ray,” she said, squeezing hard. “I know you can.”


I drive up beside the old gate that blocks the drive to the horse farm. I am a wreck, sweating with fear and the urgency to do what Parker wants me to do—even though I’m not totally sure what that is. I pull the car over onto the shoulder near the thick tree cover. When I turn off the engine, I am swallowed by the sounds of the Florida night. The property is a huge yawning darkness, and for a second I don’t think I can bring myself to enter. But of course I have to go. My daughter needs me. It is that thought that impels me from the car and brings me to the locked gate.

The lock seems old and rusted through, as though it hasn’t been used in years. This can’t be so, I know that. I pick up a rock and start banging on it hard, hoping it will fall to pieces as it would in the movies. But I can’t get it open. I’ll have to leave my car on the road and go around the gate, which is suitable only to keep vehicles from moving up the drive and not really designed to keep out intruders.

The thought of walking that long, dark road alone is almost too much. I remember the gun then and return to the car for it. I open the glove box and find a .38 Special, just your standard revolver. It’ll do. With the gun heavy in my hand, I feel slightly better, not like a girl afraid of the dark. I feel like what I need to be: a woman intent on doing whatever it is she must to protect her child or die trying.

I walk around the gate and begin heading toward the horse farm. The last time I walked this road, I was seventeen years old with nothing to lose. What I wouldn’t give now for some of the empty numbness I felt that night, that ignorance of consequences.

I am washed over by memory as I make the trek. I remember Janet Parker’s car gliding past me in the dark. I remember the clicking of its cooling engine when I saw it a while later. I remember the smell of smoke, the percussion of the gunshot. I see the halo of blond hair soaked in blood, the first time I knew Marlowe was a killer. I hear his confessions beneath the New Mexico sky. Suddenly I am thinking of Gray.


I never saw Briggs again after he made his offer that night in the motel room—or if I did, I don’t remember. I don’t think there was time for me to do what he asked. I think it was just another night or maybe two before Gray caught up with us. All I recall is suddenly seeing this mammoth form in the doorway of yet another miserable motel. I’d seen him before, I knew that much. But for some reason a deep relief mingled with my fear when I saw him standing there. He strode into the room, and it was a second before I saw the needle in his hand.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, jabbing the needle into my arm. I don’t think I even struggled. “Your father sent me for you.”

“It’s just a sedative,” he said, and he was already floating away as the substance flooded through my veins. “I can’t have you shooting me again, can I?”

The next thing I knew, I was bound in the back of his car. He burst through the driver’s door. I could see St. Francis Cathedral before I blacked out again.

I know only Gray’s version of what happened that night. How he went back to the motel and waited in the dark for Marlowe to return. How he surprised Marlowe, as Briggs had planned to do. How Gray had overpowered him in a fight, managed to knock him unconscious and bind him. His plan had been to take the car to the police station on the other side of the square, abandon it with Marlowe inside, return to the Suburban parked just a few blocks away, and make an anonymous call from a pay phone when we were far enough away.

His mistake, as he saw it in hindsight, was twofold—not using the sedative he’d brought, because he thought Marlowe was out cold, and putting Marlowe into the backseat instead of into the trunk of the vehicle. Marlowe came to as Gray drove, got loose from his bindings, and attacked Gray. The struggle ended with Gray shooting Marlowe in the face and leaping from the car just before it dove over the side of the road into the Rio Grande Valley below.

I have heard this story so many times. I have asked Gray to tell it until it has taken on a mythic quality, like a story from childhood. As I near the end of the drive and see the roof of the house through the trees, I wonder how much of what he’s told me was true. I don’t know. After my conversation with Alan Parker, everything seems suspect.

When I step into the clearing where the house and the barn and the empty horse pen stand, I am surprised by the condition of the property. It is dilapidated in a way I hadn’t expected. I imagined it repaired after the fire, cared for by the women whom my mother supposedly sheltered during their crusade to save their husbands, lovers, and sons from death row. But two of the upstairs windows are blown out, and though it’s dark, I can see that there appears to be a hole in the roof. The front door hangs off its hinges, the porch has folded onto itself. I hear the mournful calling of an owl in the distance, along with a chorus of frogs. The barn stands intact, but the whole place has an air of desertion—the desertion of years.

There’s an escalation of tension in my chest; the darkness all around me feels like it’s closing in. How have I come to be here? Is this really happening? Was Alan Parker a figment of my imagination? Out of sheer desperation, I start to yell.

“Marlowe!”

I call his name again and again, each time my voice disappearing into the thick, humid air. All the night songs cease, and everything listens to my calls, the desperate baying of a wounded animal. I drop to my knees in the dirt.

I realize then that he’s not here. No one could live in this place, this dead, awful place, not even him. The despair that sweeps over me is so total I am physically weakened by it. I put my forehead to the ground.

And then, kneeling there, my past and present one at last, I remember. I pull myself to my feet. I know where Marlowe is. Alan Parker is right; I have always known. He did need me to find Marlowe—because I am the only person on earth who knows where he might have been all these years. He has not been pursuing me. He has been waiting for me, just where I knew he would be.

I walk into the trees. I remember the way as I move through the thick overgrowth, careless of lurking snakes, ignoring the mosquitoes that feed on my skin and hum in my ear. I’d run if I could, but my progress is slow, pushing aside branches and stepping in soft places where my ankles turn. It seems to take hours, but finally I hear the babbling of the creek ahead. I come to a stop at its banks, and I see it there: the trailer. There’s a light burning in the window.

“With provisions you could live out here forever,” Marlowe told me a lifetime ago. I never imagined I would be here again, not like this.

From the bank of the creek, I call his name. The sound of it fills the night. Silence is the only answer. I am about to call again when he emerges from the trees behind the trailer.

Though he is just a shape in the darkness, I know him. He is not the man I remember. He approaches me, leaning heavily upon a cane and dragging the right side of his body. He moves slowly, as though every step causes him pain. When he draws closer, I can see that he is hideously disfigured, the left side of his face little more than an explosion of skin. I find myself recoiling, moving backward as he moves forward. Those eyes are the same black sinkholes in which I have drowned again and again.

I realize that my entire body is quavering, every muscle tense, every nerve ending electrified. I can’t believe I am looking at him, that his flesh is solid, that he stands on the ground. For the past few years, he has been a specter, haunting every dark space inside my psyche. The realness of him, his physicality, now drains all his power.

“Ophelia,” he says. His voice has an odd, warped quality, but I can still hear the music of my name—O-feel-ya. “You’re home.”

I remember thinking he was the only home I’d ever know. How sad, how empty I must have been to think that. I know what a real home is now. I have one with Gray and Victory. I’ll do anything to go back there.

“No,” I say, unable to take my eyes from his horrible face. It doesn’t even look like skin, more like melted wax. He is a mangled facsimile of the man in my memories. But, amazingly, I still feel his pull, remember how I wanted to please him, how badly I craved his love.

“How did you survive?” I ask him, my voice just a whisper. “How did you come here?”

Something awful was happening to his mouth, a terrible twisting of his face. He was smiling.

“Back in New Mexico,” he says slowly, “someone found me by the side of the road, near death. I’d been shot in the face, but I still managed to get out of the car before it went off the road.” It seemed painful for him to speak; the words emerged long and slow. “I was taken to the hospital and treated as a John Doe. I was unrecognizable, claimed to have no memory of who I was or where I’d been. When I could move around again, I called your mother. She came for me and brought me back here, cared for me until she died last year.”

I feel a surprising wave of shock and grief to know that my mother has died. In my heart I thought I’d find her here alive and well, still trying to save the condemned. I guess the abused and neglected child is always hoping for a reckoning, some restitution, an embrace that never comes. And then there’s the pain, the anger that she cared for Marlowe all these years after what he’d done to me.

“How did she die?” I want to know.

“Car accident,” he said with a shrug. “Drunk. Luckily, I had enough provisions to last me.”

I’m struck that he doesn’t seem to care at all about her. I’m not sure why I’m surprised. Dr. Brown said once, “He was a psychopath, the worst kind of sociopath. They don’t love, Annie. They can’t.”

I have no way to determine if what he says is true. For all I know, he killed her as he did so many others. Or maybe she’s not dead at all. I don’t know. There’s no time to think about that now.

I can hear his labored breathing, feel his eyes on me. When I look at his face, he doesn’t even seem human. He is vacant. I take another step back from him. I have the thought that he’s not really as crippled as he seems, that maybe this is how he lures people now that his beauty is gone: pity. I imagine him living here on this property, alone, haunting its rooms, walking its woods. The thought of it chills me.

“Who takes care of you now?” I want to know this for some reason—how he’s been living here on this decimated property, this wasteland of my memories. I wonder if someone helps him, if even as he is, he is still able to lure and manipulate and cause people to do his bidding.

“I manage,” he says. “It’ll be easier now that you’re home. I’ve missed you so much, Ophelia.”

His words seem hollow, like lines he’s rehearsed so often they’ve lost meaning. I don’t believe he has thought of me except in the most passing moments. It is I who have been obsessed with him. It is I who have thought of him day and night, plotted my way back to him. He is my sickness, eating me alive like Alan Parker’s cancer.

“I’ve missed you so much,” he says again.

He thinks I’ve come back for him. My hand tightens around the gun. Sweat is dripping down my back, and I can hear blood rushing in my ears. I realize that I’m terrified of him, as though he could somehow force me to stay, as though I could be caught like a fly in a web again, too weak, too powerless to escape him.

“No,” I say, looking into those dead eyes. “No.”

“You belong to me, Ophelia,” he says quietly, moving closer, reaching out his hand.

This has been the truth for so long. Since the day I met him, I have been clinging to him or running from him. I have allowed him to control my heart and my mind. I have loved him madly, and I have lived in terror of his return. And yes, I have hated him. Briggs’s words come back to me: Because you hate him, Ophelia. I saw it on your face in that diner. You think you love him, but you know how evil he is, that one day he’s going to kill you, too. That you’re going to be a body someone finds in a motel just like this one.

Marlowe Geary did kill me, and I was his willing accomplice. Gray found my body in that New Mexico hotel room and brought me back to life. Now I am responsible for bringing myself back to wholeness, to heal myself so that I can be the mother my daughter deserves, the woman I deserve to be.

I remember then that he’s Victory’s father, that because of who we were together, she exists in this world. The union that has made me weakest has produced the union that has made me strongest. It seems a raw truth, so odd that it’s almost funny. The universe has a sense of humor, a taste for irony. But this is a private joke I don’t share. He has no right to know her; he has nothing to do with her.

“You belong to me, Ophelia.”

“Not anymore.” And I find I have nothing more to say. There is not a moment of hesitation, of conscience now that he is injured and unarmed. I do exactly what I have come here to do, what Ophelia has been trying to do for years. I take the gun from my waist and open fire. I see his body jerk and shake with the impact of the bullets. I keep firing until it is empty. When I’m done, he’s on the ground, his arms and legs spread wide and so still, an oval of blood spreading around him. I walk over to his body and see his staring eyes. A river of blood flows from his mouth. I stand there watching for I don’t know how long, until I’m certain beyond any doubt that he is finally dead.

In those moments I remember all the girls I watched him kill—I see their heart-shaped necklaces, and sparkle-painted nails, their miniskirts and cheap tattoos. I hear them screaming, hear them crying for their mothers. I couldn’t help them then. I can’t help them now. There’s only one little girl I can save. There’s only one cry I can answer. I feel a sharp pain that starts in my neck and spreads into my head. A bright, white star spreads across my vision then, and I am gone.